This weekend I found what I think is a striking description of place. In a letter to Paul Celan the German-Swiss poet Nelly Sachs writes:
"When great weariness besets me I think of Paris and Dresden, both shells for the most beloved of people"
(Celan lived in Paris while her great friend Gudrun, who had saved the lives of Nelly and her mother, lived in Dresden)
Thinking of place as a shell has so many reverberations for me: something that grows on one, a membrane one pulls around one, something that precipitates and binds..thank you Nelly.
